A re-play of some material about my first male lover, Larry, as background for two other postings: one about him right now (well, as of yesterday); and one about GBTQ guys and how they fold their sexual desires, practices, and identifications into lives of accomplishment, as Larry has done — and as the linguist Aaron Broadwell (celebrated in the second posting) has done.
“The three Larrys”. From that 3/16/24 posting:
[the] three Larrys are one: Larry1, my first male lover, in 1970 a grad student in linguistics at Ohio State, who took a leave from OSU, spent some time working in NYC (as Larry2 in my telling), eventually returning to OSU (as Larry3 in my telling) to write that fine PhD dissertation [under my nominal direction]. Ending up as a professor in Japan, with a long-time male partner, but having to conceal his homosexuality and this relationship for the sake of his job. He’s retired now, and times have changed, so now I can talk about my first male lover Larry (not Danny) in my postings (something that pleases him); and he and Isao can present themselves as partners in public and work on getting their relationship officially recognized in Japan [achieved on 5/29/24!]
“The grace of lovers”. From that 3/1/24 posting,
a celebration of the poets Jack Spicer and Frank O’Hara, who came to me as a gift from my first male lover; Larry [Schourup] brought me both Spicer and O’Hara, and steered me to Stephen Sondheim as well.
Friends share their enthusiasms — that’s one of the benefits of friendship — but with lovers this sharing can become an intimate connection of its own, a lover’s gift, a lover’s grace. (That was over 50 years ago, and our romantic, intensely sexual, and intellectually passionate coupling long ago morphed into a loving friendship that has lasted both of our lives.) Of course, we exchanged gifts, as lovers do; here I talk about some of the things that Larry gave me.
… From an appreciation [of O’Hara] by Peter Schjeldahl:
O’Hara’s life was measured out in a sort of endless homage to his heroes — the great exemplars of personal and artistic integrity like Pollock, Franz Kline, and especially Boris Pasternak; the revolutionaries of poetic attitude and style like Apollinaire and Mayakovsky, and the forms of emotional identification, the movie stars like James Dean, Carole Lombard, and so many others, whom he celebrated brilliantly without embarrassment and with only the slightest, functional trace of irony.
You might not have imagined that a poet of pop-cultural frivolity and sexual excess [see his poem “Une Journée de Juillet”, a little hymn to the pleasures of gangsucking and to its restorative powers] would also come with a passionate commitment to moral principles — nobody expects Boris Pasternak, the ethic of his work at MoMA, or his devotion to friends and colleagues — but there it is, as urgent and earnest as anything in Jack Spicer, but without Spicer’s self-destructive urges and preoccupations (among them, with death). In any case, a lover’s gift to me not only of some amazing poetry, but also of a moral model, someone to learn from.